We arose earlier than expected mainly due to "car lag" if that exists. We changed two time zones yesterday from Arizona to Texas so our sleep pattern is a bit broken.

In any case we enjoyed a great breakfast in the hotel, probably the best since we landed in US in a motel. All the workers in the motel were Mexican descendants and they were speaking their own brand of English-Spanish which was so amusing to us. This was basically a short conversation going on: "Yo le dije when the time comes, she is a siamese cat y no se presta. Y los otros two young cats juegan mucho. Osea how can they do that?"

Anyway, off we went on our trip which would be at least 450 miles towards San Antonio. On the path to San Antonio we wanted to stop at a small town called Banderas which was supposed to be the "cowboy capital of the World"...as so many things in Texas it has to be larger and first.

We arrived at Bandera and found a small street with lots of bars and shops but no cowboys to be seen. Just in case we went into the tourist information centre and sniffed around. It resulted that there are many ranches around here accepting tourists. We looked at the prices, thought we needed a bit of a luxury event and also thought..."horseriding in Texas...it must be done!"

So we selected a ranch called "Dixie Dude Ranch" (a dude by the way we found out is someone who is not from the territory and does not know about the customs and animals, etc. Its a friendly description for tourist).

Price: $125 per person including riding, accommodation and 3 meals per day. It also has a pool, activities, hot tub, trails, etc and the people are extra friendly.

It was too late for us today to do a horse ride but we did join dinner and the activities. The food here by the way is extremely delicious and nothing we had tried before in US (good farm food).

After dinner they took all the visitors on a hayride, and they prepared a campfire with lots of marshmellows for us to burn. We were surprised to find out that no one else knew about the "perfect marshmellow technique" which we had developed during our camping nights...so Veronika taught all the children (and adults) in the group how to do the ideal one!

As people left to go to sleep (at 8am) we stayed behind next to the campfire and had a long chat with one of the cowboys (Justin) and a state trooper from Louisiana staying for his wedding anniversary at the ranch. Veronika and myself were cracking up, not only due to the local accents but because Justin was like a stand up comedian without actually trying to be funny...he was just funny to listen to.

He explained to us the difference between a "Yanki" and a "Darned Yanki" (the first comes to visit and leaves, while the second one comes to visit and stays), his experiences hunting a "chupacabra" which is a fictional animal which he says he shot (I aint eating no unidentified object, he said when he picked it up), his rodeo riding experiences and his family reunion experiences (he said that the family met for the first time in years as the police had forbidden them to have family reuions as it all ended up in drunkeness and fights in Banderas).

He ended his stories telling us that his father wanted to call him Justin "Case" (Just in Case) and he wanted to name his son Rod E Owen (Rodeo Win)...etc, etc.